Word: firmamental
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...never have been a Galileo of the social firmament, but as a journalist Vance Packard is clear-eyed enough to have seen, before anybody else, that the post-World War II U.S. had got caught up in a compulsive competition for status. The proof came in The Status Seekers (1959), a dissection of those Americans who, as the author put it, were "continually straining to surround themselves with visible evidence of the superior rank they are claiming." Since that happened to include just about the entire U.S. population, the great status game, once focused, provoked a great many fears that...
...cream soda in 1874. The ice-cream cone was the hit of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 in St. Louis. Christian Nelson, an Iowa candy-store proprietor, thought up chocolate-covered ice cream in 1919 but got nowhere until Russell Stover, an ice-cream company superintendent, searched the firmament and invented the name Eskimo Pie. By 1922 the pair were selling a million pies a day. A Youngstown, Ohio, confectioner named Harry Burt refined the idea by developing chocolate-covered ice cream on a stick, and the Good Humor bar was hatched. In 1924 the Individual Drinking...
...writer and host-narrator of the new public television series Cosmos takes the controls of his fantasy spaceship. Sagan's grandfather can rest easy now. His grandson is not only making a living, thank you, he has also become a star?indeed, a supernova of sorts?in the scientific firmament. Sagan's books, ranging from speculations about life beyond the earth (The Cosmic Connection) to ruminations about the reptilian ancestry of the human brain (The Dragons of Eden) have sold millions of copies and have been translated into a dozen languages. His lectures, on campus as well as off, attract...
...What I saw next was the Prophet, chewing the firmament up the street. I hurried over...
...could not be found-or recorded on film-in the natural world. But now, in the postStar Wars era, stories are created merely to provide a feeble excuse for the effects. Star Trek consists almost entirely of this kind of material: shot after shot of vehicles sailing through the firmament to the tune of music intended to awe. But the spaceships take an unconscionable amount of time to get anywhere, and nothing of dramatic or human interest happens along the way. Once the ships reach their destination, they do not encounter the kind of boldly characterized antagonists that made Star...